Manual installations of FreePBX is considered an EXPERTS ONLY exercise. This method of installation is enough to get CORE functionality of FreePBX. Non-commercial modules may not function as expected or detailed in the Wiki's. Certain modules and features may require additional software to be installed and configured on the server.

**** COMMERCIAL MODULES CANNOT BE INSTALLED ON THIS OS ****

For Asterisk 16 you must enable app_macro in make menuselect

Initial System Setup

When installing the machine, at package selection make sure you pick - at least - 'web server' and 'SSH server'. You can also turn off 'Debian desktop environment'.

Log in as, or switch to, the Root User

Please note: THIS IS IMPORTANT! You must run the entire process as root. Attempting to use 'sudo' later on will not work. Please don't ignore this. You must run this entire installer as the root user. If will be helpful to enable ssh logins as root. To do so, you need to change the line 'PermitRootLogin without-password' to 'PermitRootLogin yes' in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. You can do this with the following commands.

As part of this install, you will be asked several times for a mysql password. You can leave this blank (just push enter) as the instructions further down will generate a secure password. If you set a password now, you will cause problems further down. Please do not set a mysql password unless you are confident in your abilities to secure a SQL server.

Install nodejs

Reboot server

Install Prerequisites

After you machine has rebooted, you are now sure you're running the latest Linux kernel. (At the time of writing this document, the Kernel supplied was 3.16.)

Install Legacy pear requirements

pear install Console_Getopt

Install and Configure Asterisk

Download Asterisk source files.

cd /usr/src

Compile and install DAHDI.

If you don't have any physical PSTN hardware attached to this machine, you don't need to install DAHDI.(For example, a T1 or E1 card, or a USB device). Most smaller setups will not have DAHDI hardware, and this step can be safely skipped.

You will be prompted at the point to pick which modules to build. Most of them will already be enabled, but if you want to have MP3 support (eg, for Music on Hold), you need to manually turn on 'format_mp3' on the first page.

Configure ODBC

Edit /etc/odbcinst.ini and add the following. Note that this command assumes you are installing to a new machine, and that the file is empty. If this is not a freshly installed machine, please manually verify the contents of the file, rather than just copying and pasting the lines below. The 'EOF' does no go in the file, it simply signals to the 'cat' command that you have finished pasting.

You may need to verify these paths, if you're not on a x86_64 machine. You can use the command `find / -name libmyodbc.so` to verify the location

Edit or create /etc/odbc.ini and add the following section. Note that, again, this command assumes you are installing to a new machine, and the file is empty. Please manually verify the contents of the files if this is not the case.

That's it!

You can now start using FreePBX. Open up your web browser and connect to the IP address or hostname of your new FreePBX server. You will see the Admin setup page, which is where you set your 'admin' account password, and configure an email address to receive update notifications.

There are (at the time of writing) approximately 50 additional modules that can be installed to enhance the usability of your FreePBX machine - you can install these via Module Admin.